See, this is a small, but I think important, example of why science has lost credibility on the global warming front. Science, one of the most important science journals in the world, published a fake photo of a polar bear on a melted ice floe in the middle of an infinite sea to defend global warming science. From a Daily Telegraph blog:
Science magazine is deeply disturbed:
We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts.
To illustrate its item about scientific facts, Science chose this image of a doomed poley bear:
One small problem. As James Delingpole reveals, that poley bear image is fake. It’s been photoshopped. Science subsequently admitted:
The image associated with this article was selected by the editors. We did not realize that it was not an original photograph but a collage, and it was a mistake to have used it.
Oh, come on! That’s because the editors were seeing what they wanted to see.
You can’t complain that the significant loss of credibility of global warming researchers is unfair–and then use a fake photo to illustrate your point–particularly given the history of recent months. What an embarrassment.
May 12th, 2010 | 1:15 am
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May 12th, 2010 | 1:22 am
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May 12th, 2010 | 4:09 am
Part was stolen from Dr. Spencer’s book cover.
May 12th, 2010 | 7:14 am
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May 12th, 2010 | 7:23 am
How refreshing. Science magazine corrected their trivial error by replacing a photoshopped picture with one from National Geographic. The new photo can be viewed here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689/F1
Did the original photoshopped version have a greater editorial impact than the new one?
Wesley typed: “…particularly given the history of recent months.” More innuendo on your part. Please say what you mean. Every investigation has cleared Professor Jones and his research of the smears perpetrated by the likes of you, yet you ignore that and falsely suggest that a problem exists. Please say what you mean. It’s called having an honest debate.
Would that good Christian blogs like SHS and Jim Hoft’s notoriously unreliable Gateway Pundit would follow Science magazine’s lead. Instead, you just smear and move on, burying your errors in a daily stream of sewage.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 12th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Don’t you follow the links? It’s already there, you don’t have to repost it. But that photo also creates an intentional false impression. If this is sewage, stay away.
May 12th, 2010 | 7:54 am
We could also be extra mean and point out that polar bears can swim. Really, really well. They aren’t called “Ursus maritimus” because they live on Prince Edward Island.
May 12th, 2010 | 9:23 am
The New York Times ran an article about the American Petroleum Institute in April of 1998. It outlines a very specific and detailed plan by oil and gas industry representatives to invest millions of dollars in an effort to undermine support for the Kyoto Protocol and discredit the scientific consensus opinion that greenhouse gases are causing the planet to warm.
http://www.euronet.nl/users/e_wesker/ew@shell/API-prop.html
The draft plan, titled “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan,” concedes that opposition to the protocol is not shared by the public or a vast majority of scientists worldwide. “There has been little, if any, public resistance or pressure applied to Congress to reject the treaty, except by those ‘inside the Beltway’ with vested interests,” it notes.
Read: Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan
http://harryhammer.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/global-climate-science-communications-action-plan/
Furthermore, when All Gore was in kindergarten Time magazine and Popular Mechanics were running articles on the work of a physicist named Gilbert Plass.
Physicist Gilbert N. Plass had just completed some calculations on the atmospheric warming effect of carbon dioxide. He certainly wasn’t the first person to make such calculations, but he was the first to make use of computers to perform the calculations in much greater detail. He drew attention to the point that man-made CO2 emissions would have a significant warming effect on the Earth’s temperature. Popular Mechanics reported the results under the headline “Growing Blanket of Carbon Dioxide Raises Earth’s Temperature”.
Read: Al Gore was 5 Years Old at the Time
http://harryhammer.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/time-magazine-and-popular-mechanics-57-years-ago/
May 12th, 2010 | 9:48 am
Jeffrey,
As a Christian I have to smirk whenever someone tries to smear someone’s work by saying that they are one. I second Wesley’s remark-if this is “sewage,” save us the pleasure of your comments.
May 12th, 2010 | 9:51 am
Polar bears can swim-so are they really “stranded” on that ice flow? (new picture).
May 12th, 2010 | 10:25 am
There are two separate issues here.
First of all what kind of mindset is common at Science magazine to allow this kind of mistakes to happen? Are editors and subs over there really so taken by AGW they would gobble up any image that could help the cause as “true” without a hint of critical thinking?
(this applies to the authors of the letter too…surely it is quite bad news to hear the mistake has been spotted by non-believers? Didn’t they look at any printed copy of their letter?)
Secondly, and it’s even worse: rather than pump up the brouhaha, the authors of the letter could have just said “Oops!” and asked Science for a correction. But no, there’s been cries of “it’s the deniers fault!”. Hardly something that would suggest the AGW believers as ready to correct their mistakes, however small.
May 12th, 2010 | 11:32 am
What’s so funny about the original picture is that it’s so obviously fake. I thought it was the first rule of photoshop to check your shadows.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 12th, 2010 at 12:35 pm
That and the small size of the ice floe.
May 12th, 2010 | 12:24 pm
Here’s an image for you:
According to David O’Reilly the CEO of CHEVRON, the world currently consumes oil at a rate of about 40,000 US gallons per second. He says, “the scale of the energy system is enormous.”
Imagine a river of oil.
I thought it might interesting to see just how much oil we are talking about here, so I compared the amount of oil that we are currently burning in the world to the amount of water that flows in various waterfalls.
I used average yearly flow rate figures.
The flow rate of Jog Falls is about 153 cubic meters per second, a little less than our imaginary river of oil.
See what it looks like for yourself:
Read: According to the CEO of Chevron
http://harryhammer.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/according-to-the-ceo-of-chevron/
May 12th, 2010 | 12:53 pm
Just to bring together all the things that make Jeffery’s rhetorical question “Did the original photoshopped version have a greater editorial impact than the new one?” stupid:
1. The size of the berg/flow are dramatically different and that has an emotional impact.
2. The cropped nature of the new picture has a very different implication than the expanse of the original fake. One naturally assumes that there’s land just outside the new picture that has been cropped out. The fake gives the impression that it’s dozen’s of miles to the nearest land. This is important because as others have stated Polar Bears can swim.
3. Finally, ‘Science’ uses terms that make it clear they don’t really view the fake as a problem. It’s a “collage”. One has to take a fairly liberal view of the word collage, which usually indicates that one has multiple pictures that look like multiple pictures, not them morphed together to look like one picture. An organization that truly was admitting guilt would call the picture what it is: a photoshopped fake.
May 12th, 2010 | 1:16 pm
The fake quality reminds me of an ACT press release and SCNT research from Korea published in prestigious “science” publications. Talk about a stream of sewage. Geez.
May 12th, 2010 | 3:07 pm
At least Science admits their mistakes.
By the way, how is Rom Houben or the ads in NEJM, Smith?
May 12th, 2010 | 3:17 pm
[...] First Things (blog) [...]
May 12th, 2010 | 4:05 pm
David: I updated the Houben story at SHS to reflect that he failed facilitated communication test, which, by the way, did not indicate he wasn’t conscious.
I don’t think I owe a correction on the NEJM story. It was not an NEJM study about the doctors’ attitudes, but I don’t think I said it was.
Moreover, contrary to your assertion, I do correct mistakes, such as the time I wrote that Richard Dawkins believed in eugenics, and then upon a more careful reading of what he wrote, realized I had erred and officially retracted the claim.
But you, as usual, entirely missed the point of the post.
But it sure indicated how obsessed you are with SHS. Perhaps you need some help.
May 12th, 2010 | 5:17 pm
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May 12th, 2010 | 7:16 pm
Really, Wesley: is THAT the best you can do? Seems to me they’ve only duplicated your own techniques, albeit accidentally. Remember your (in)famous ice graph, hmmm?
May 12th, 2010 | 7:43 pm
Two images of a polar bear and cub “trapped” on a small ice floe, taken in August 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254862/All-sea–polar-bear-cub-drift-shrinking-ice-12-miles-land-expert-says-survived.html
“It is thought the mother and her young cub, aged about nine months, had gone out hunting seals and climbed onto the floe to cool down. The drifting ice shrank to just a few yards wide as it drifted down the Olga Strait of Svalbard, Norway, forcing the bears to huddle in the middle.”
‘An adult can swim up to 50 miles at five or six miles per hour, so the mum here should have no trouble completing the 12 miles back. The cub will struggle more and certainly faces an exhausting swim but I imagine it will have been OK if they paced the journey.
‘Cubs usually doggy paddle behind their mum, clutching onto their back, so they are shielded from the current.’
‘The biggest threat to these two is actually hyperthermia, as their body temperature could rise and that could kill them if they swim too fast.
May 13th, 2010 | 6:00 am
It looks like the author will have to continue the public service of revealing the hysteria (and mendacity, let us own) around AGW. The hysterical commenters continue unrehabilitated. Keep it up, SHS!
May 19th, 2010 | 10:29 am
[...] GLOBAL WARMING HYSTERIA: Science Uses Fake Photo to Defend Warming Scientists …. [...]
May 29th, 2010 | 9:17 am
Harvard Physicist calls Global Warming a Hysteria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFUgGZTjqaY
And Sings the Obama Song :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aka97HmMPNw
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